Good day everyone,
I hope you are all well and had an excellent week, welcome to CryptoGod-1’s blog on all things crypto. The gaming project FinSoul has been accused of an exit scam which involved laundering money through Tornado Cash and paying actors to pose as executives within the organisation.
FinSoul
On the 22nd of May 2023 Fintoch, a leading technology company, announced the official launch of its ground breaking metaverse platform, FinSoul. The launch described FinSoul as an innovative masterpiece which would combine AIGameFi, programmable NFT, and metaverse DeFi, while also offering users unparalleled gaming experiences and financial services. By the 10th of October 2023, it was clear this was not the case.
The development team behind the gaming project are accused of carrying out a massive exit scam which is likely to have defrauded investors of more than $1.6 million through market manipulation. It is believed they staged some actors to pose as executives in a bid to raise funds of developing the gaming platform. Instead of fulfilling their promises, the team instead allegedly transferred the funds to themselves in bridged Tether (USDT). To make the origin of the funds difficult to trace the team reportedly laundered the money through the cryptocurrency mixer called Tornado Cash.
To add to investors concern, this is not the first time the FinSoul developers have been accused of misconduct. When FinSoul was announced, as part of the release an article in AlexaBlockchain noted:
"Utilizing advanced technologies such as Unreal Engine 5 and Cocos 2D, FinSoul delivers both 3D and 2D gaming experiences to its users. Players can access unique AI partners and NFTs through governance tokens, and they can venture into the Metaverse Market to explore game dungeons and acquire game NFT assets."
Back on the 23rd of May 2023 the DeFi project Fintoch made some big announcements through a press release, including claims to have acquired the technology to create a metaverse platform using Cocos 2D and Unreal Engine 5. The same day, ZachXBT, an on-chain sleuth claimed that it was a scam. The project was shown to have siphoned off $31.6 Million and bridged it to the Tron blockchain. CertiK claims that the project rebranded itself on social media and everywhere as “Standard Cross Finance (SCF).”
CertiK went on to note that key executives of Fintoch and Standard Cross Finance were identical individuals, with these individuals, including the CEO, CFO, and COO, being actors from the entertainment industry. The CTO’s image was also found on a promotional poster for a media company while the analyst wasn’t certain about the identities of the other two executives.
The team continued to promote FinSoul as part of their rebranded Standard Cross Finance team, despite their tarnished reputations, on platforms like YouTube and Telegram. In one particular video they showed an alleged "R&D Headquarters" which turned out to be an office complex on East Hamilton Avenue in Campbell, California. A fake promotional event held in Vietnam was also shown as part of the video.
It was later revealed via blockchain data on BscScan that the team had deployed its token contract on the BNB Smart Chain network. This took place on the 10th of October 2023, with 100 million FinSoul (FSL) tokens being created. Some tokens were transferred to other accounts, with the creators ultimately retaining 97 million FSL tokens.
One of the transfers involved creating a liquidity pool for FSL on PancakeSwap, a decentralized exchange, from 210,000 FSL tokens. The token price began to trade at $0.3911 per token yet within hours the price skyrocketed to $17.5774. Eventually the price settled around $5. Around 4:30 pm and 5:00 pm UTC the price dropped to near zero, with the price collapse coinciding with two significant events. The first was the transfer of the remaining 97 million FSL tokens to another address. The second event was the sale of the entire token supply into the liquidity pool. This action resulted in the draining of $1.6 million worth of Binance-pegged USDT from the pool.
The most annoying aspect of this event is that not only are the fraudsters behind this project still at large, the Standard Cross Finance team have also managed to convince investors to reinvest in their project. With the FSL token relaunched with a new contract, the current value now stands around $1.29 per coin. Unfortunately in the crypto space, the naivety of investors seems to continue no matter how much scams and fraud takes place.
Have a great day.
Peace. CryptoGod-1.
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